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Thin Ice

A little while ago I donated to the Kickstarter campaign to bring the Thin Ice climate change documentary to US television. My name is even listed on this page. WooHoo! I haven’t heard anything about it for some time and so went looking to see what stage they’re at. It turns out the documentary began airing on public television in the USA in July this year which is fantastic.

The documentary was made in collaboration with Victoria University and Oxford University and is very good. It’s the best climate change documentary I’ve seen. Here’s a clip from the New Zealand Herald reporting the story:

Ceiling repairs are currently underway in the downstairs flat and I’m hoping to make it through the week without having to ring any utility companies or plumbers. Although Ben had to ring the city council this morning because there was a problem with our recent council tax bill. To our shock and horror the lady on the phone was able to sort it out immediately. Ben described her as “disturbingly efficient”. We think she may have been hired by mistake 🙂

7Comments

Thank you for that, Rachel! Thin Ice really is excellent. I watched it several times when it was first released in 2013, and I’d even been anticipating it so much that I watched all the video excerpts they put on their site in the weeks before. Aside from the importance of the topic, I just love science. I love hearing scientists talk about their work and how we know what we know about the natural world. To not simply stop at saying what we know, but to explain how we know it and the process we went through over decades or centuries to get that understanding is, I think, the best way to teach science. Especially for kids, but really for anyone. It engages our curiosity and shows science to be the mystery story and detective story that it actually is.

My background is in math and economics, and later, software development. About the time An Inconvenient Truth came out, I got to the point of really wanting to understand the basics of climate, how it works, how we know what we know. Of course, by that time there were a lot of resources on the web, at just about any level I could want. And then I found out how many different fields of science come together in climate science—chemistry, physics, geology, biology, oceanography. What an amazing subject.

It’s also, by the way, how I originally found your blog. I don’t recall if it was a web search or a link from one of the climate science blogs I follow, or even which post it was, but one of your climate posts was how I ended up here.

Thanks, Mukei. I’ve seen Thin Ice several times too and I’m sure I’ll watch it again. It stands out from the other climate change documentaries I’ve seen because it is made by scientists and explains so well what they know and how they know it. It’s also aimed at a general audience and so I think it’s something which most people should be able to follow.

I haven’t posted much about climate change recently but it’s always on my mind.